Part-"Lost", Part-"Hunger Games", Part-"Saw", Part-"Hostel". "Squid Game" made all the right moves to be mysetrious, disturbing, unrelenting, and emotional all at the same time. It is a nuanced experience that will shake your emotional and psychological cores in every spectrum, in almost every episode.
For years, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) has struggled to turn his life around. After losing his job at a factory, he has struggled with alcoholism and gambling everything good in his life has turned sour. The latest challenge is finding out that his only daughter is moving to the United States with her stepdad. At the end of his wits, a mysterious suited man approaches him and offers him the chance to play children's games with the chance of winning billions of won. Gi-hun reluctantly accepts but soon finds out that the too good to be true offer has a deadly clause in exchange.
"Squid Game", for us, was not only a show. It was a tour-de-force in terms of saying a lot about society, greed, money, inequality, morality and we're pretty sure a whole lot more. Every episode was well-crafted and well-written in terms of its broader strokes with a clear vision on what it wanted to achieve and say to its audience. You could say that the hyper-violent world of "Squid Game" was unbelievable but time and time again, Director and writer Hwang Dong-hyuk was able to show that even reality can be as demented, hurtful, or worse than being in a deadly game of chance and luck. That for us was were "Squid Game" really shined as it was able to humanize these deadly games. Each game had a surprising twist that left us shocked, moved, and in emotional highs that we never anticipated.
Admittedly, all is not perfect in "Squid Game". For us, having to contend with a lot of characters, the show struggled to find a well-rounded approach to make each character fully-fleshed out. Aside from Gi-hun, expect most characters to have a few scenes to really explain their backstories. Also, don't expect for all the mysteries of the island where the games happen to be resolved or revealed. It may hevaily-hint for a second season in the works but we certainly wished they spent additional time explaining its lore and it certainly needed more episodes like a traditional series would have gotten if it was a network release. In any case, we highly-recommend "Squid Game". It has gore, it has drama, it has thrills, and it had a lot of surprises for those who dare enter it.
Rating: 4 and a half reels
Why you should watch it:
- it was gruesome and disturbing but also emotional and deep
Why you shouldn't watch it:
- we wished it had more time and more episode to fully flesh out its mysteries and a handful of key characters
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